Hospitality personnel who work in small businesses like motels, entertainment venues and restaurants often interact directly with a business’s guests. As the front-line representation of your company, staff members should be encouraged to make an effort to enhance a customer's experience through carefully-calculated sales techniques, making recommendations for customer-focused, value-added products and services that can help increase your company's revenue.

In the Know

To be effective at improving sales, your staff must be fully knowledgeable about your products and services. Train and orient newcomers and provide ongoing customer service training for your regular staffers, particularly if you introduce a new product or service. The more your hospitality staff knows about what you offer, the better positioned they are to actually explain associated benefits to customers.

The Right Stuff

Train staff on how to read customers, ask leading questions and make appropriate recommendations that will increase sales. For example, a waiter in a restaurant that tries to promote the seafood special isn't going to get very far if the customer hates fish. The waiter is better served finding out what type of entrées the customer enjoys and then making menu recommendations that help increase sales, while simultaneously providing the diner with an enjoyable experience.

Surefire Fails

Randomly making recommendations, or coming across looking like they're trying to get more money from the customer with no real plan of action, is not only a way to reduce sales, but for hospitality staffers to alienate customers altogether. For example, if you run a bed-and-breakfast, you might direct your front desk clerk to encourage families to upgrade to a suite rather than a standard room. Telling the customer the standard rooms are “cramped, tiny and uncomfortable” doesn’t do a good job of encouraging the customer or promoting your product. On the other hand, a savvy staffer might read the family and say, “We have a suite available for a few dollars more if you're interested -- it overlooks the duck pond in the back yard, and will give everyone extra space.”

Incentives That Work

Rewarding hospitality staff for a job well done is a good way to encourage exceptional selling behavior. Consider both individual and group incentives such as giving staffers a bonus every time they upgrade a sale or meet a pre-established group sales quota. Staff will feel appreciated for their efforts and be more likely to go the extra mile to help ensure guests have a good time, while simultaneously increasing your revenue.

About the Author

Lisa McQuerrey has been a business writer since 1987. In 1994, she launched a full-service marketing and communications firm. McQuerrey's work has garnered awards from the U.S. Small Business Administration, the International Association of Business Communicators and the Associated Press. She is also the author of several nonfiction trade publications, and, in 2012, had her first young-adult novel published by Glass Page Books.